HIROSHIMA RUINS

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 21947, 15 February 1946, Page 3

HIROSHIMA RUINS

ATOMIC JBOMBING LIFE CREEPS BACK INITIAL BLAST RECALLED (Official Correspondent With J-force.! HIROSHIMA, Feb. 12. When the New Zealand component of the occupation forces arrives in Japan next month the major item ot sightseeing interest will undoubtedly be the atomic bomb-blasted ruins .‘it Hiroshima. The old familiar pattern of aerial destruction which the New Zealand troops have seen throughout Italy is completely altered here. The usual sagging roofs, shrapnel-pocked buildings and half-demolished walls are nowhere visible —only acre after acre of fragmentary debris —the pulverised wreckage of a once thriving city. Life is slowly creeping back into this dismal waste. The strangest sight is probably that of shabby, scorched trams clattering slowly along a few of the streets. It is difficult to know how the passengers find their destination, for one block is the same as the next. Wooden shanties are being erected and the few remaining buildings of a more substantial architecture which survived the explosion are. although gutted. being put back into temporal-} commission. Japanese Reporter’s Scoop To-day I talked with probably the first reporter to chronicle perhaps the most important event in m .pern history. Me is Mitsuo Une, the Kure representative of the great Osaka Quinchi newspaper anr he still does not realise that he scooped the world's biggest story.

He was the first man :o send in the story of the bombing of Osaka. The sub-editors did not believe him. He was at Kure when '.he appalling exolosion was heard from Hiroshima, followed by a great pillar of flame and smoke. He thought a military ammunition dump had exploded and he hitch-hiked to Hiroshima to collect information.

His story, which is still on the file, is extremely naive. It commences: “At 3.20 a.m. three B29’s dropped a bomb, something like a torpedo bomb, and as a result, the whole city of Hiro shima is a mess.”

The sub-editors phoned back sceptically for a check on the story, saying that no one bomb could destroy - whole city or. if it could, the course of the war had been changed Une, wiio is now busy collecting information about the Australians and New Zealanders for the edification of Quincbi readers, recalls that a contemporary reporter was caught bv the explosion and literally flayed. The latter has very sensibly decided to give up journalism and is now a Buddhist priest.